Posted
by
timothyon Monday April 26, 2010 @05:11AM
from the hey-you-put-up-that-blank-wall dept.

Sabriel writes "Google's appeal against a 2008 defamation ruling in Brazil over an anonymous posting on Orkut has been denied, and Google has been fined $8,500US ($9,100) for the crime of being vandalized. In the words of the judge, Alvimar de Avila, 'By making space available on virtual networking sites, in which users can post any type of message without any checks beforehand, with offensive and injurious content, and, in many cases, of unknown origin, [Google] assumes the risk of causing damage [to other people].' I'd submit a blunter opinion of this farce, but it might be considered offensive and injurious content. ... I wonder if he's related to the judge in Italy?"

The problem with this trend is that the internet isn't like real life. In real life, stealing your information is difficult. The thief would have to dig through your trash and other distasteful things, maybe even break into your house. And if they wanted to see what kinds of things you were doing, or what you liked to buy, maybe so they could sell that information to an advertising company; they would have to hire a private investigator.

And that's just for you. What about everyone else?

The internet, and the way most people use it, leaves us all much more exposed. The simplest tracking cookie can tell someone everywhere you've been, from the items pages of amazon to your private social networking profile. Anonymity on the internet keeps us safe by making it that much harder to mine accurate information.

Remember that (Brazilian) woman who had her insurance revoked after the insurer learned that she had pictures on (a friend's) facebook account, wherein those pictures she was smiling and having a good time, so she (obviously) must be cured of her major depression. Reality is much different. The not-drug treatment for depression is socialization, and everyone smiles for the camera. I hope she sued the balls off of that company, but I never followed up on that story.

This is just an example of the damage that a company (which most people would agree is a legal one) can cause by abusing the exposure people face on the internet. What would less scrupulous individuals do if the internet lost anonymity? I'm sure it wouldn't affect anyone using it criminally. They'd simply get a proxy service or make their own. Suddenly, your information would become even more valuable, and you might get blamed for crimes you didn't commit if someone used your information to slander another person.

The internet allows anonymity for a reason. It must stay free and open and anonymous.

Demanding to change that is folly, and the laws that allow for this kind of criminalization of the service providers are trying to do just that.

if your not willing to back it with responsibility of that expression?

In other words, Freedom of Expression does not mean freedom to slander. Too many people use anonymity to attack others so as to deny others the ability to respond in defense. Sorry, but calling someone a pedo and then hiding behind an anonymous id is just horseshit.

Either stand behind your words or don't bother. We don't need Freedom of Expression becoming a forum troll's fallback. Living in a world of false accusations and slander wi

So... Brazil doesn't believe in freedom of expression on the Internet, nor do they subscribe to the "post anything, trust nothing" philosophy of the Internet.

Can you name a single country in the world that does? Say what you like, but the fact is that all over the world governments and especially the public support censorship. You just say the magic words: child porn, terrorism, Muhammad, anorexia, extreme porn, etc, etc and people, pundits and politicians will trip over themselves in their eagerness to shut the web down. Public support for censorship in western democracies is overwhelming.

You don't think this is "really" supporting censorship. Well then here it is: The Ultimate Censorship Supporter Acid Test v0.9:Someone has written a graphic, explicit, sordid, supportive, but purely textual fictional story about sexually molesting children under the age of 5. It has been uploaded to a webserver somewhere. Should this page/site be censored?

If you answered yes (or are prepared to argue for it) then you are a firm supporter of censorship. You support the censorship of the purely written word, because you are either too afraid or too disgusted to stand up for the rights of everybody. People hate this test because it forces them to interpret the law and rights they way they should be interpreted; as applying equally, logically, and without prejudice to everyone, everywhere, all of the time.

Unfortunate schmucks like me who actually took these principles to heart in their formative years then get lumped with heaps of shit for daring to mention them out in the open where pedophiles/terrorists/witches/anorexics/suicide groups/etc are involved. I suppose we should have spent our youth learning to be hypocrites in order to survive in this enlightened age.

Google are fighting a losing battle. The public, governments, the media and now the legal system are not on their side. The internet genie is being put back in the bottle, one step at a time.

The classic strawman argument to justify censorship: There exist situations where people are liable for their use of speech, therefore censorship is valid. The fallacy here is thinking that no censorship means no liability. Censorship and liability are two very, very different concepts. Liability means people must be tried in open court under the law. Censorship means that works can be banned without recourse to trial or law, and all outside the public eye. Empowering censors weakens both open society and the rule of law.

As you point out nearly all normal people support limits on the written and spoken word depending on the circumstances.

Indeed, depending on the circumstances. And the trouble is those circumstances for 99.9% of people will be "If they're talking about something I don't like." Given the opportunity, the public would happily ban "violent" video games. There used to be a rule of law which prevented this kind of thing from happening, but fear and apathy is slowly eroding it. We will all end up like Australia before too long.

The "fire in a crowded theatre" example is problematic; you are not being charged with act of expressing "fire;" you are being charged with the act of endangering the public. Whether you yell "fire" or change the screen to display a burning theater is immaterial.

Of course this argument can be applied in bullshit situations like "we weren't charging him with writing down with the government, we were charging him with endangering the public!"

An aroused, vigilant public and court system is the only real defense.

But, in any case, preventing people from yelling "fire" in a movie theatre is not a form of censorship.

http://slashdot.org/submission/1219710/Open-net-debate-on-Internet-laws-in-Brazil?art_pos=1 [slashdot.org]
(links to original story) Brazil has opened public, free, internet debate on it's new internet law proposal. A hodgepodge of contradicting state laws, lawsuits, and rulings were blocking efforts to encourage more internet use, so a new federal law proposal is open to debate, including topics such as education, culture, freedom of expression, right-to-use, user and provider rights and responsibilities, anonymity, content removal and notices, crime and law enforcement, everything. Currently the site accepts comments on each paragraph of the law. Last October there was debate on the general principles to be included in the law. Brazilian Portuguese, but there is Google translate and volunteers translating to English.

Psychological projection is the unconscious act of denial of a person's own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, the government, a tool, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings. Peter Gay describes it as "the operation of expelling feelings or wishes the individual finds wholly unac

Personally I think it's refreshing. Most of the Slashdot posts over the last 1-2 years have been "America sucks". While America/the U.S. is far from perfect it's no worse than say, the European Union as a whole. Watch the movie "Latya 4-Ever" as example. I found this movie shocking because I didn't think such thing could happen within the EU Socialist Paradise (people without homes or jobs are supposed to be cared for). It's a bit like the kettle calling the pot dirt

It's not enough to say, "He said bad things about me." You also have to show financial harm has been caused, and if you can't do that then the anonymous poster, or google.com which allowed the post, would be held blameless and protected by the First Amendment...

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Essentially this means that Google cannot be held liable for defamation, since Google would have to be treated like a speaker or publisher in order to be liable for defamation. All Google has to do to be immune to defamation suits (and privacy violations, and threats, and nearly every other cause of action that's based on a speech act) is show that it didn't actively influence the content of the speech.

"The holier than thou attitude is what I am taking issue with. "Yay America" is not an opinion, it is mocking another country for its laws. It does not earn any goodwill." Yay Planet Earth!We're Number 1!

Screw Planet Earth. If we looked at the state of freedom and included the whole of the planet I'd be pretty damned disappointed (In fact, I am).

This situation in Brazil is bad, and saying Yay America isn't inappropriate in this situation. Feel free to shout 'Yay Canada' as well, and as an American commenting on this issue I'd respond with 'Hell yeah Canada, let's not screw up like Brazil is right now'. Then I'd yell over to Europe and say "Who over there isn't screwing up like Brazil? Yay to you too!" Then we can all get together and give a good shout of 'Boo Kim Jong Il'

I'm pretty glad that you guys over in Europe have such strong protections for your populace against large corporations. Yay Germany (Last I heard they had some pretty solid protections)

But to be honest, I'm pretty damned glad for the opportunity to have been born in the United States, I think this country gets enough things right that I'm comfortable in not just saying 'yay America' but 'fuck yeah'. Especially considering how much more it could suck if I were in a country like Iran, Somalia, Sudan, etc.

That's about stupid. In effect, WalMart should assume responsibility for that mouthy punk who used WalMart's intercom system to tell all black people to leave the store. WalMart is racist, because some kid used their intercom to make a racial statement. Extending that idea just a little bit - if you owned a shopping mall, and some skin heads staged a protest on your property, (with or without your permission) then you would be responsible for all the hate speech that resulted.

The fact is, many nations, including mine, have fascist laws that need to be changed. We need more activists working to make free speech a reality, and stop holding web sites and site administrators responsible for the rantings of ignoramuses.

The two examples are completely wrong. A better example is if I put a big white board on one side of my building and tell everyone to pick up a pen and write messages on it.

A wall is not suppose to have graffiti on it and the one painting messages on a wall is committing a crime. But if you open a forum which is public for everyone your intent is that everyone is leaving a message.

No one implied that Google was hacked. Providing a place where people might express themselves does not make you responsible for every idea that might be expressed. It's as simple as that. Own a pub? A couple of gorillas decide to duke it out, for any number of reasons? HEY! IT'S YOUR FAULT FOR HAVING A PUBLIC PLACE WHERE PEOPLE CAN DRINK, TALK, OR FIGHT!

Google didn't re-post the libelous comments AS GOOGLE or as a Google Employee or legal functionary. if they had, then your example "B" would be dead-on. Google's case clearly falls under Example "A".

They were simply providing a forum. If you read the TOS of the forum in question the person in question was clearly in violation of the TOS. So someone misrepresented themselves (by agreeing to the TOS) and then posted something libelous which Google was not quite quick enough in removing. How, in any SANE universe is this Google's fault?

No, the Judge is just a freaking moron and/or the law in Brazil is stupidly written.

Exactly the point I was about to make. While I disagree with the decision and think it sets a dangerous precedent, the difference between what happened with Google and GP's examples is what steps were taken to prevent the injurious action. If skin-heads are protesting in your mall and you do nothing, you might be partly responsible for their actions by implicitly allowing them to carry them out. If you try to stop them or call the police, even if they can't be stopped, at least you have attempted to mitigat

... you do nothing, you might be partly responsible for their actions by implicitly allowing them to carry them out. If you try to stop them or call the police, even if they can't be stopped, at least you have attempted to mitigate what's happening.

Conversely, I was told by a lawyer that if I in any way censored or limited speech on a web site I used to run then I could've been construed as the 'Editor/Publisher', and could've be held liable for the content. If I took no action, I was in the clear.

Google was not hacked: they invited everyone to post content, so the similarity is lost.

The Mead paper company is not going to like this. They not only invite everyone to use their paper to write things on, but they actively promote it. Now clearly they will be held responsible for all the libel written on their paper.

He wasn't criticizing the judge, so I am not sure exactly why you are defending him. He was criticizing Brazil's laws (civil or otherwise). Brazil's laws around libel and slander absolutely suck beyond all comprehension. Brazil has close to the worst in the world. They do infringe greatly on the quality of public speech in Brazil, and if crap like this continues, all speech by all citizens in Brazil. The US on the other hand has, bar none, the best libel and slander laws in the world... which is to say, we basically have none. In order to get nailed for libel or slander in the US you need to 1) cause actual and real harm 2) personally know it is a lie 3) are presumed innocent with extremely high bars set for proving 1 & 2, and 4) can counter sue any asshole that loses their case. You are more likely to be struck dead by lightening than get sued and lose a slander case in the US.

That said, the US has an equivalent to Brazil's terrible libel and slander laws. US copyright laws have more or less the same effect. The only reason why I would take evil US copyright laws over evil Brazil libel and slander laws is that you can make a half-assed argument that copyright does something useful and, far more importantly, crappy slander and libel laws protect slime ball politicians much better than crappy copyright laws.

Brazil is actually doing some innovative stuff in terms of copyright law. I don't know exactly where it stands today, but they had an awesome proposal that they were giving serious though to a little while back on enforcing sanity in copyright law. Give me that plus US libel and slander law, and I think you are looking at some pretty decent steps taken in protecting freedom of speech.

You will probably read some comments bellow “defending” Brazil against an “offense” made by an American. As a brazilian, this sort of attitude only embarrass me.

Brazilian libel and slander laws suck. Period. As a country, we don’t value that much freedom of speech (although we speak on the contrary). When you read the brazilian constitution you can find an article that states: “Freedom of speech is guaranteed in our country”. With an addendum: “But anonymity is forbidden”.

The decision of the judge only reflects this doctrine that bans anonymity and makes difficult the job of whistleblowers.

This has some interesting consequences. For instance, brazilian companies that have stock options in the NY Stock Exchange have great difficulties to comply to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sox). Sox says the company MUST have procedures to allow anonymous complaints, but brazilian laws says that you are NOW ALLOWED to make anonymous complaints. Talk about Cath 66, he?

In civil law countries (like Italy too) the judges have little choice in applying the law.

Hogwash. Civil law does depend heavily on codes and statutes but that does not mean there is no room for rational judgment on the part of the judge.

If I yell in the streets something libelous I am responsible, even if someone else told me first. The same applies to Google...

Google didn't yell anything. Google provided a forum. Since we are so fond of analogies this is like holding the paving company that built the street responsible for what someone said on the street. You might as well hold the maker of a megaphone [wikipedia.org] responsible for whatever anyone says through one.

Easy tiger, you are not even Brazilian to take offense, certainly has never lived in the US or Brazil. You are not even from this side of the globe. And look at you, with your panties on fire by e-rage. RAAAARGH!!!

Seriously man, you don't know who you were replying to. For all you know, he's a Brazilian living in the US (yes, a foreign person living in the US preferring the US in some ways over his own country. Incredible, I know.) Take me for instance. I'm Nicaraguan, but I live in the US, and the hell that I will back there again. After having lived half of my life under civil law and my other half under case/common law, I much prefer the later when you take all pros and cons into account. I personally know quote a few Brazilians living here who feel the same.

I'm not saying that the dude is a US-living Brazilian, but you really don't know who you are blasting away with your ARGGH-AMERCUNT! post, do you?

you are an asshole and can shove your nationalistic pride up your ass.

You were just looking for an opportunity to vent some long-built steam against what you *think* is American nationalism. You found something, you built yourself into an e-rage and made up an excuse to blast the living crap out of it. I'm not one to judge people for their proclivities, so do as you please. Just don't complain if you get blisters after screwing that nice straw man you just built here.

You can live in a place where corporations can do anything and people can do nothing. Call it freedom if you want and go away.

See, that's reverse nationalism supported by thick brush painted generalizations of something you barely know of. Projection is the clutch for those who like to feel morally superior. Let me know how it works for you. Or better yet, get some help and stop being such a sensitive e-bitch looking for a gratuitous cause to fight for. It might actually do you some good.

This freedom do not gives you the right to offend others. You have the freedom to say whatever you want, as long as you don't use this freedom to clearly offend someone.

And this is where we part ways. You cannot have the right not to be offended, even if the government says you do. Such a right (perfectly enforced) would lead to a society where noone could say anything to anyone for fear of offending them. And it wouldn't stop there as I personally know people who'd be happy to take there offense at the slightest smell to a judge. Wearing the wrong cologne today?

I'm not agreeing with this judge at all, please don't assume that for a minute.

However, we are entering a very precarious phase of the internet. As more and more of our user-generated content goes online and into "cloud" storage, we are turning over huge amounts of private information and possibly illegal data to these hosting companies. The push to upload data is growing, and the counter-push to demand responsibility of the hosts is also growing.

The first volley was almost 10 years ago when Napster was taken down for enabling illegal filesharing. Lately The Pirate Bay has been under attack for the same thing. Now we see Google under attack for providing a platform for someone to make illegal statements. The trend is to demand that those that make services available also police those services.

And those making the demands have been winning.

The only true longterm solution is to force encryption and invite-only data access. This pushes us away from an open Internet which Sir Berners-Lee envisioned and into the same parochial networked clusters that we had before.

It's sad, but as long as there are people out there who think that morality can be legislated, then we will forever have the problem of needing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Maybe when Google owns everything end to end they can just have a splash screen to the whole internet saying "I agree not to be offended by anything I may see beyond this point", if you don't check it you don't get in.

I say decentralize the web. Make it so that websites are stored "on the cloud", with dozens, or even hundreds, of redundant copies broken into small chunks on random people's computers. Make publishing these sites easy, so anyone can do it, removing the need for centralized holding sites like Youtube, blogspot.com, etc. Reduce ISPs to being a purely city-to-city pipe, with intra-city connections being done through the individual computers themselves.

Freenet [freenetproject.org] is already doing a lot of this, if we can just make it more mainstream...

Nope.. It's more like a company sets up a graffiti wall on a major road, gets companies to sponsor it to make money, then invites people to write whatever they want. The company then denies all knowledge of what the people write and refuses to check it at any time to ensure people aren't using it for illegal purposes.

Does Brazil have such a law? If you're going to do business in these countries and establish local subsidiaries, you have to accept their rules. If you don't like it, pull out and encourage the international community to put pressure on totalitarian states to change their ways. Of course, whether or not giving carriers immunity is an important issue is up for debate.

Brazil doesn't have any sort of safe harbor provision for providers. So no "carrier immunity" for you.It's "shoot the messenger, unless he tells us who sent the message and where that person is located".

So, yeah, unemployment rates might be going up but you should still be glad you live in an otherwise decent country.

Well if you listen to the words of a certain Sheikh having a house that isn't protected by a large fence with barbed wire is tantamount to leaving food out on the street. Just as a cat will come and eat that food, so will a vandal come and deface your property. If the judge doesn't want to be held liable for what people do to his property, he should protect it better.

When will people understand that freedom of speech is inherently linked to offense and injury on the side of the receiving part of any 'verbal abuse' or 'insults'... This is not something you can (or need to) protect against without sacrificing (or eroding) freedom of speech!
I hope judges in other countries (and perhaps Brazil too) will realize that this is not a matter of law, but a matter of common decency. If you insult someone willingly you're a dick and that's it, no need for laws, no need for convictions and most of all no need for a jihad or any physical harm.

Oh yeah, and people who believe they need (or have right to) legal protection against insults are dumbasses who are willing to sacrifice one of our basic rights for their own personal little feel-good gain. Grow some fucking self-confidence and just don't dignify some things with a response! Every time I hear someone proclaim 'the should be a law against saying X' a little part of me dies...

I get that you're hinting at the job of politicians to make laws, but the judge can always rule according to his interpretation of law. If he see the libel laws and the constitution (which guarantees freedom of speech) and weigh them he can choose to throw a case out of court because the freedom of speech right trumps another law *in that particular case*. I guess in this case he didn't because Brazil offers nu such protection for anonymous people, but still the judge could have called bullshit instead of f

If you insult someone willingly you're a dick and that's it, no need for laws, no need for convictions and most of all no need for a jihad or any physical harm.

It is not always that simple, insulting or lieing about someone in a public forum can have series consequences for the receiving party. People are not dumbasses for not wanting to have their reputation tainted, more than a few people and businesses have been ruined simply by their reputation, and as such there most definitely is a need for laws for people that insult/slander/malign people in a public forum, it can have severe consequences for the person being maligned and most definitely should also have co

Sure, actions do have consequence. If someone is insulting someone he will look bad in public opinion, not the person insulted. That should be enough! And if someone falsely accuses someone of a crime he himself is in violation of the law...
Some stupid remark by a nobody will go unnoticed, unless he himself involves the law. And someone well known will think twice about lying and insulting someone because it can cost them their own head...

I hope your never falsely accused of a terrible crime. Although if you are, and the allegation is made public, you will find out first hand just how much your damage your version of freedom of speech entails.

Screaming "Rapist" or "Paedophile" at innocent people isn't something that should be protected in my opinion. But then I'm Australian where freedom of speech isn't explicitly guaranteed. So I'm sure you'll dismiss my opinion as that of an ignorant savage. But hey, go team America!

The USA has:
- The most different lobby groups trying to get laws eroding free speech (left, right, liberal, Christian, Muslim... whatever. All 'for' free speech but against 'X being said because *that* is harmful').
- By far the most lawsuits against people who express opinions (anonymous or not, satire or not), sometimes with a conviction.
- Very strong censoring, some self-inflicted under pressure (like Comedy Central), some because of lobby groups (can't say 'fuck' on TV).

It is inconvenient for Google, but they don't derive a lot of their revenue from user comments.

If google were required to kick all Brazilians off Orkut, perhaps they could try marketing it to the rest of the world again. I was using Orkut, and my friends were joining slowly but surely, until Brazil took it over and everyone on Orkut started getting gigantic volumes of Brazilian spam. It's amazing that with all Google's language tools, they can't give me a spam filter that scores up everything in a language I don't read.

Besides, the problem is not so much prohibiting defamation, as it is to put the onus on every site that allows user-created content. Not only I find it an abuse (it's not Google fault someone posted illegal content there), but unfeasible: do they expect *every website on the web* to block all public content until manual moderation?! It's obviously impossible.

It would be fun to see a widespread movement from worldwide (read: not subject to Brazilian law) persons defa

How does that work? Before you stand at the edge of the street to give forth an expression of thought must you scream "My name is Bob Smith, I live at 24 Garden Terrace and I was born on the 17th of February, 1976 at 12:05pm"?

For one time I RTFA before posting, it has little or no details about the causes.

I mean, the devil lies in the details... There is a law in Brazil that allows only registered posts? Or that IPs are logged? If Google operated their service disregarding the requirements of the country, then they got themselves in trouble. Or it was that the judge just make that decision by himself?

For an example of what it could be, I just want to recall that the "italian judge" mentioned in the summary fined Google not because someone had put a video of several people harassing and beating a mentally handicaped person. The real reason is that Google did refuse to retire something like that when they were notified that it was there, and they only did retire it when they were threatened. Of course, then TFS just wrote that Google was fined "because someone had uploaded the video".

If we have to debate about facts, it would be nice if we are informed of them with a little more depth.

Yes, one of the posters here has pointed out that Brazil forbids anonymous speech, which I was not aware of when I made the submission*. However, Orkut requires you to sign in - unless there's some "anonymous coward" option I missed - so the poster must have supplied an email address that the Brazilian authorities could not or did not trace. How is that Google's fault? There are no magic wands, and this is still a blatant case of "shoot the messenger".

Either way, the mere fact that anonymous speech is forbidden should be attacked.This effectively makes it impossible to have real free speech and the pressure should come from outside as, unfortunately, Brazilian citizens don't give a damn about this.

Keep in mind this can potentially affect all of you, as Brazil and BRIC countries in general are gaining momentum in the post-crisis economic scenario.

A lie can cause serious damage to someone. Some neighbours of mine had their home vandalised because they had been falsely accused of being involved in animal experimentation. If you post such a lie deliberately then aren't you in some way responsible for the harm suffered?

But Google is offering to allow people to post whatever they want maliciously, and offering to hide their identity from everyone - even themselves. If Google is going to allow people to do this, then why are they not taking on resp

You're right. If I walk into a bar and say to someone "Could you please kill my wife? We have $100,000 in the safe with the combination for the safe being 4 7 2 6?" Clearly the person has done nothing wrong after all, its not like that information killed his wife. It was the man with the gun who killed the wife. Hell, the widowed husband could then sue the man with the gun for wrongful death and recoup some of the money he lost during the murder.

Im sure there are cases where libel/slander comes into play (I can never get them straight),
but isn't the real issue that people are taking the law into their own hands?
Vigilante justice is a bad idea (as well as being illegal) for just that reason.
Even if what was said about your neighbors was true, those vandals broke the law. Why didnt they ask questions before flying off the handle?

A lie can cause serious damage to someone. Some neighbours of mine had their home vandalised because they had been falsely accused of being involved in animal experimentation. If you post such a lie deliberately then aren't you in some way responsible for the harm suffered?
But Google is offering to allow people to post whatever they want maliciously, and offering to hide their identity from everyone - even themselves. If Google is going to allow people to do this, then why are they not taking on responsibility for the harm themselves?

By that argument the mail service should open and check all letters and the phone company listen to all phone calls. You can use both to spread malicious lies anonymously.

In other words: if you own a wall and someone scribbles 'whoever reads this, sucks' on it, you're liable. I can see that, but it's not how, at the moment, most of the western world is put together. Walls would have to be extremely clean, for example.

In a previous story [slashdot.org], I commented [slashdot.org] about how censorship in Brazil should get more international attention.

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. In Brazil there are no safe harbor provisions for ISPs and judges just refuse to acknowledge the fact that Google Brazil is a subsidiary and might not have any control about Orkut, which is hosted in US ground.

If you think about it, it's actually worse than China in some aspects: it's as if China ordered companies to censor information outside o

Yes, this is all about anonymous postings, but surely anyone can make up an identity online?

I guess the reasoning (such that there is any) here would be that by deliberately creating a false identity the poster is circumventing any information storing the service provider has which would be another offence. With anonymous posting the user is simply using a facility that is open to them.

To my mind, and presumably many others this makes no difference - or at least no difference with respect to Google's culpability - but this judge disagrees.

I encourage you to find my address. You may find my name. You might even find my city. But unless you grab my IP address and submit a request to the appropriate authorities, you'll never find out who I am.

So I am essentially anonymous. Knowing my name and city aren't unique enough to actually identify me.

Not that anyone actually cares who I am. But maybe they would if I said I was molested by a 54 year old priest whose initials are J.R.

Stupider than being fined for every post on orkut? Funny thing is if orkut is shutdown nothing will replace it because no one would want to shell out 10 grand everytime some idiot posts something bad. Is the judge trying to shutdown Internet in brazil? Brazil would have year 2000 Internet, you can read but don't touch.

How do you premoderate a resource with millions of users? More probable is google and other hosting providers and ISPs lobbying for laws that specifically make them not liable for the actions of the users. That is of course if google can't appeal anymore. Otherwise an appeal seems more probable.

How is that "freed speech zone" thing working out that was around in the time of Bill Clinton's reign and then famously used by George W. Bush? Has the saviour Obama stopped them yet? Or has he continued to use it as a useful tool to further his political career?

This has nothing to do with free speech though so why are you blacklisting Brazil? free speech is a right in Bazil, anonymity while doing so is not though. Australia also provides free speech, but the government wants to censor the shit out of the internet so they probably still deserve the blacklist. People need to learn to seperate free speech from the consequences of the content, just because you have the right to express yourself doesn't automatically invalidate laws that protect people from slander, ha

try this on for size: the holocaust never happened, and gays suck (pun intended). see what i did there? and guess what? neither i, nor slashdot, have been or will be sued for this! that's freedom of speech. just because the NYT might not want to publish hate speech because they're interested in selling their newspapers (or good journalism. either one works.) doesn't mean you're not free to express yourself, anonymously, without fear of retribution.